I often think about green, environmental impact, and what we’re doing to the environment. One major reason I became an engineer was to leave the world a little better than when I arrived. I’ve gotten sidetracked a few times, but I’ve tried to help, even if just a little.

The good people in LSI’s EHS (Environment, Health & Safety) asked me a question the other day about carbon footprint, energy impact, and materials use. Which got me thinking … OK – I know most people in LSI don’t really think of ourselves as a “green tech” company. But we are – really. No foolin’. We are having a big impact on the global power consumption and material consumption of the IT industry. And I mean that in a good way.

There are many ways to look at this, both from what we enable datacenters to do, to what we enable integrators to do, all the way to hard-core technology improvements and massive changes in what it’s possible to do.

Back in 2008 I got to speak at the AlwaysOn GoingGreen conference. (I was lucky enough to be just after Elon Musk– he’s a lot more famous now with Tesla doing so well.

IT consumes massive amounts of energy
The massive deployment of IT equipment, all the ancillary metal, plastic wiring, etc. that goes with them, consumes energy as its being shipped and moved halfway around the world, and, more importantly, then gets scrapped out quickly. This has been a concern for me for quite a while. I mean – think about that. As an industry we are generating about 9 million servers a year, about 3 million go into hyperscale datacenters (or hyperscale if you prefer). Many of those are scrapped on a 2, 3 or 4 year cycle – so in steady state, maybe 1 million to 2 million a year are scrapped. Worse – there is amazing use of energy by that many servers (even as they have advanced the state of the art unbelievably since 2008). And frankly, you and I are responsible for using all that power. Did you know thousands of servers are activated every time you make a Google® query from your phone?

I want to take a look at basic silicon improvements we make, the impact of disk architecture improvement, SSDs, system and improvements, efficiency improvements, and also where we’re going in the near future with eliminating scrap in hard drives and batteries. In reality, it’s the massive pressure on work/$ that has made us optimize everything – being able to do much more work at a lower cost, when a lot of cost is the energy and material that goes into the products that forces our hand. But the result is a real, profound impact on our carbon footprint that we should be proud of.

Sure we have a general silicon roadmap where each node enables reduced power, even as some standards and improvements actually increase individual device power. For example, our transition from 28nm semi process to 14nm FinFET can literally cut the power consumption of a chip in half. But that’s small potatoes.

Ethernet abounds
How about Ethernet? It’s everywhere – right? Did you know servers often have 4 ethernet ports, and that there are a matching 4 ports on a network switch? LSI pioneered something called Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE). We’re also one of the biggest manufacturers of Ethernet PHYs – the part that drives the cable – and we come standard in everything from personal computers to servers to enterprise switches. The savings are hard to estimate, because they depend very much on how much traffic there is, but you can realistically save Watts per interface link, and there are often 256 links in a rack. 500 Watts per rack is no joke, and in some datacenters it adds up to 1 or 2 MegaWatts.

How about something a little bigger and more specific? Hard disk drives. Did you know a typical hyperscale datacenter has between 1 million and 1.5 million disk drives? Each one of those consumes about 9 Watts, and most have 2 TBytes of capacity. So for easy math, 1 million drives is about 9 MegaWatts (!?) and about 2 Exabytes of capacity (remember – data is often replicated 3 or more times). Data capacities in these facilities are needed to grow about 50% per year. So if we did nothing, we would need to go from 1 million drives to 1.5 million drives: 9 MegaWatts goes to 13.5 MegaWatts. Wow! Instead – our high linearity, low noise PA and read channel designs are allowing drives to go to 4 TBytes per drives. (Sure the chip itself may use slightly more power, but that’s not the point, what it enables is a profound difference.) So to get that 50% increase in capacity we could actually reduce the number of drives deployed, with a net savings of 6.75 MegaWatts. Consider an average US home, with air conditioning, uses 1 kiloWatt. That’s almost 7,000 homes. In reality – they won’t get deployed that way – but it will still be a huge savings. Instead of buying another 0.5 million drives they would buy 0.25 million drives with a net savings of 2.2 MegaWatts. That’s still HUGE! (way to go, guys!) How many datacenters are doing that? Dozens. So that’s easily 20 or 30 MegaWatts globally. Did I say we saved them money too? A lot of money.

SSDs sip power to help improve energy profile
SSDs don’t always get the credit they deserve. Yes, they really are fast, and they are awesome in your laptop, but they also end up being much lower power than hard drives. Our controllers were in about half the flash solutions shipped last year. Think tens of millions. If you just assume they were all laptop SSDs (at least half were not) then that’s another 20 MegaWatts in savings.

Did you know that in a traditional datacenter, about 30% of the power going into the building is used for air conditioning? It doesn’t actually get used on the IT equipment at all, but is used to remove the heat that the IT equipment generates. We design our solutions so they can accommodate 40C ambient inlet air (that’s a little over 100F… hot). What that means is that the 30% of power used for the air conditioners disappears. Gone. That’s not theoretical either. Most of the large social media, search engine, web shopping, and web portal companies are using our solutions this way. That’s a 30% reduction in the power of storage solutions globally. Again, its MegaWatts in savings. And mega money savings too.

But let’s really get to the big hitters: improved work per server. Yep – we do that. In fact adding a Nytro™ MegaRAID® solution will almost always give you 4x the work out of a server. It’s a slam dunk if you’re running a database. You heard me – 1 server doing the work that it previously took 4 servers to do. Not only is that a huge savings in dollars (especially if you pay for software licenses!) but it’s a massive savings in power. You can replace 4 servers with 1, saving at least 900 Watts, and that lone server that’s left is actually dissipating less power too, because it’s actively using fewer HDDs, and using flash for most traffic instead. If you go a step further and use Nytro WarpDrive Flash cards in the servers, you can get much more – 6 to 8 times the work. (Yes, sometimes up to 10x, but let’s not get too excited). If you think that’s just theoretical again, check your Facebook® account, or download something from iTunes®. Those two services are the biggest users of PCIe® flash in the world. Why? It works cost effectively. And in case you haven’t noticed those two companies like to make money, not spend it. So again, we’re talking about MegaWatts of savings. Arguably on the order of 150 MegaWatts. Yea – that’s pretty theoretical, because they couldn’t really do the same work otherwise, but still, if you had to do the work in a traditional way, it would be around that.

It’s hard to be more precise than giving round numbers at these massive scales, but the numbers are definitely in the right zone. I can say with a straight face we save the world 10’s, and maybe even 100’s of MegaWatts per year. But no one sees that, and not many people even think about it. Still – I’d say LSI is a green hero.

The future
Hey – we’re not done by a long shot. Let’s just look at scrap. If you read my earlier post on false disk failure, you’ll see some scary numbers. (http://blog.lsi.com/what-is-false-disk-failure-and-why-is-it-a-problem/ ) A normal hyperscale datacenter can expect 40-60 disks per day to be mistakenly scrapped out. That’s around 20,000 disk drives a year that should not have been scrapped, from just one web company. Think of the material waste, shipping waste, manufacturing waste, and eWaste issues. Wow – all for nothing. We’re working on solutions to that. And batteries. Ugly, eWaste, recycle only, heavy metal batteries. They are necessary for RAID protected storage systems. And much of the world’s data is protected that way – the battery is needed to save meta-data and transient writes in the event of a power failure, or server failure. We ship millions a year. (Sorry, mother earth). But we’re working diligently to make that a thing of the past. And that will also result in big savings for datacenters in both materials and recycling costs.

Can we do more? Sure. I know I am trying to get us the core technologies that will help reduce power consumption, raise capability and performance, and reduce waste. But we’ll never be done with that march of technology. (Which is a good thing if engineering is your career…)

I still often think about green, environmental impact, and what we’re doing to the environment. And I guess in my own small way, I am leaving the world a little better than when I arrived. And I think we at LSI should at least take a moment and pat ourselves on the back for that. You have to celebrate the small victories, you know? Even as the fight goes on.